Friday, January 08, 2010

There's a lot more Green Screening going on than you'd think...

Blimey. What I find interesting about this is how television and film acting must be becoming increasingly abstract - like performing in some kind of theatrical experiment in minimalism.

ALSO: what's interesting about this from a writery point of view is that one mistake you can make when you start out is to write certain scenes because you imagine they'll be easy to shoot, and avoid others because they might be too expensive. Whereas in fact it's often the simple things (lots of extras, night-time shoots) that cost a lot, and the apparently difficult (exploding cars, shooting in big stately homes) that can be a lot easier than you think.

If it's not for budgeting reasons, why is it that US TV makers seem to go for green screening so much? I was always under the impression that SFX were really expensive, explaining the huge budgets of so many SFX-overload Hollywood films and the crappy look of low-budget shows trying to make monsters.

Although I suppose it can be pretty expensive and a bureaucracy nightmare to shoot on location.

I think the last bit: green screen type FX aren't cheap, but certainly cheaper and easier than filming on certain locations. Bear in mind many US shows have almost feature-level budgets - the pilots anyway, where audiences now expect the sort of scale of concept and FX you would get in a movie.

WHOA... am feeling slightly, just slightly, cheated. So that means that while I, as a poor student filmmaker, am calling rough all the places begging/grovelling/bribing for locations, other people are just green-screening it!